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Beef Olives

Beef Olives are rolled beef slices stuffed with a forcemeat mixture, fried, and served with sauce or stewed olives.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Beef Olives

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the forcemeat

  1. Make a forcemeat by mixing veal, ham, soaked bread, truffles, mace, parsley, shallots, beef marrow, long pepper, salt, lemon peel, and mountain wine.

  2. Cut slices of beef from the under part of a rump or sirloin, brush with beaten egg, and cover with forcemeat.

Roll and coat

  1. Roll up the beef slices and secure with a skewer.

  2. Dip in egg yolk and coat with seasoned bread crumbs.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry in boiling lard or butter until golden brown.

  2. Serve with a rich sauce or surrounded by stewed olives.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Veal + truffletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together815 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Ham + truffletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together516 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lean veal
Forms the body of the forcemeat, giving it a firm, sliceable texture when cooked.
Beef marrow or veal suet
Adds fat to the forcemeat, keeping it moist and tender during frying.
Beaten egg
Binds the forcemeat and helps the bread crumbs adhere to the outside.
Seasoned bread crumbs
Forms a crisp outer coating that browns during frying.
Prime beef slices
Wrap the forcemeat and provide the main meaty flavour of the dish.

The step that matters

Frying in boiling lard or butter. The fat must be hot enough to brown the crumb coating quickly. If it is too cool, the crumbs absorb fat and turn greasy, and the beef cooks before the outside colours.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, ham, bread, milk, truffle, parsley, shallot):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, ham, bread, milk, truffle, parsley, shallot. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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